


Freedom

by liveonanon



Series: Salt Skin [3]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Angst, M/M, PWP, RST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-12
Updated: 2013-02-12
Packaged: 2017-11-29 01:17:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/681052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liveonanon/pseuds/liveonanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kagami finds himself kneeling and guessing too often when it comes to Akashi.  The formality of Akashi's family rears itself once or twice.  And in the course of insulting Kagami's cooking, Akashi corrects Kagami's misunderstanding of just what they are to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freedom

**Author's Note:**

> Third in the Salt Skin series. Series title taken from the song [Salt Skin](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKzgZUYHlU8) by Ellie Goulding. Though I'm pretty sure she didn't imagine someone would be inspired in the fictional gay smex way when she wrote it.
> 
> [Daimonji](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gozan_no_Okuribi): summer event in Kyoto where they light certain mountains in the area on fire in the shape of different things, but mostly in the kanji for "big". I've seen it, it's pretty cool! If a bit anticlimatic lollll

Freedom (2013.01.31)

 

There were a scant number of summer days left in the days after their first argument, but they were sweltering to the point that Kagami didn't want to move.

Yet he did - he knelt in front of Akashi once again like he had in that stuffy room, a keen sense of deja-vu spreading through him. Apparently Akashi thought the same, because this time the hand that rested on his head was tender and uncharacteristically apologetic. Kagami was not aware that he had done anything wrong, but he leaned into it all the same.

In that moment he could keenly remember how sharp Akashi was, in all sense of the word. In the lazy, heated lull he forgot, but no matter how generous he was with his money and time, he was still a loaded gun among predators. He had the perfect, whiplike crack of words and mask.

This time he started slow. Akashi lasted a whole thirty minutes of him just kissing and nibbling. _Worshipful._ The hums he made as he rode out each swell, the quake of thighs under Kagami's tongue, the way everything from the waist up still looked prim and proper, not a hair out of place - briefly Kagami sparked like a vengeful god at the sight. The switch flipped on and he _destroyed_ Akashi, left him bent at the waist over him, susurrating his name an infinite number of times. After that it took a few tugs of Akashi's hand and a single, filthy _Taiga_ before he finished rutting his fill against one creamy hip.

This was not vengeance - Akashi was above such petty things - but Kagami did note a peculiar kind of preoccupation as Akashi went through the motions of living after the fight. Reasons were varied, and Kagami suspected them all - that the morning he'd found Akashi missing from their bed he had seen a ghost, that Kuroko himself had called, that someone had briefly kidnapped Akashi and taken humiliating pictures of him on a train because he was too goddamn pretty for his own good (not that Akashi ever took trains like a regular human being). All Kagami knew, with that beast-sniffing sense that he had, was that no one could ever force Akashi to do anything, yet that particular brand of viciousness was reserved for exactly that.

He had gotten no words and he hadn't asked. That was just the nature of whatever was between them. No, it wasn't fair that the breadth of his pain was clear to Akashi and yet he knew nothing of what made Teikou's old leader tick save sex, but like Akashi and the casual way he guided Kagami towards every flat surface in the mansion, Kagami had ceased to care.

In return, the pace was...liberating. It meant he could explore freely. Recently he could think of Aomine rationally without feeling the need to beat the shit out of someone or scream. Numbness had spread every time he saw them together - but now it was only a church bell, tolling in the distance. It didn't seize his heart at every turn when he saw children playing in the ditch catching crayfish, or they passed a kindergarten on the road, or heard sirens in the distance. Even little things, like sharing a water bottle, eating popsicles, scrubbing Akashi's back in the bath, now reminded Kagami of new skin under old scabs.

He was no longer running headlong towards great, glorious things, but that didn't mean there was no meaning. Sleeping late was meaning. Going to the library and borrowing the Japanese civil servant exam textbooks was meaning. Cooking for Akashi was meaning. 

It was not lost on him that two out of three was about Akashi. Questions built up sometimes like a faucet being switched on steadily until water poured down in torrents - but then he always remembered how static and unmoving Akashi could be. How there was only air to both sides of their tightrope.

Kagami hadn't always been like this. Maybe either of them could have continued forever, alone.

(In his heart, he was a little doubtful. Akashi sure didn't seem like he was just passing the time. What he was, was a smart gambler. Kagami wondered for so long what the other redhead did for a living that one day he searched the cookies on the computer and found it: online poker. 

He sat back in the chair. It wasn't fear or even apprehension that bolted through him, it was even less nervous. Was he just a game, then? An investment? Or was this simply some warped experiment on whether or not Stockholm Syndrome in reverse worked too?)

"You're thinking too loud," Akashi murmured from his lap. The heat during the night was hardly better than during the day but tonight was special. Tonight Akashi had gotten them a room in a hotel for a couple of hours and insisted on turning off all the lights as they sat on the balcony.

There - a spark on the mountain. "Akashi," Kagami urged but Akashi didn't move, just turned his head inward towards his stomach.

He half-expected the tongue against his belly button. Yet when it swiped back and forth his stomach couldn't help but suck in his breath. In response to his mental flailing Akashi turned and arms went around his hips. They snuck inside his yukata (black and blue, hand-me-downs from an old closet) and leisurely squeezed his ass.

He groaned to feel the wet rasp of tongue and fabric against the growing bulge in his boxers. He could feel the air shift when Akashi breathed. Thumbs massaged the break of his legs wider. Akashi's legs slipped to the floor and as the flames spread in the shape of a "大", Kagami bent one leg up to his shoulder, afloat on nothing but desire.

_Submission_ itself was a victory when it came to this. To Akashi. Because Akashi was letting him give. Akashi lent meaning in the flick of tongue on the inside of his cheek. They were both rewarmed, reanimated corpses twisting into laughable facsimile.

(Of what could have been. _Of what could be._ )

Questions, unasked.

And information given, unasked for. "You didn't watch," Kagami accused.

"I've seen the Daimonji before. I live here, you know."

The look in Akashi's eyes was so in-the-moment that Kagami felt momentarily blindsided. It transformed his face into a mask of lazy, unhindered pleasure. _No_ , and the word was like a finger on his heart. _No way._

"You're not gonna tell me you reserved this _hundred-thousand yen room_ so only one of us could watch the fucking Daimonji."

His smile, it had no business looking so damn sweet. "I don't allow deviation from my plans."

"And what'm I?" he asked suddenly. Kagami stared down his nose and thought of a million ugly, wretched things he could say to end this farce once and for all. He said none of them.

Akashi's face resembled the moon above them. A stripe of shine appeared when he wet his lips. "That day. I had an omiai," he whispered softly. 

_Damn_ , was Kagami's first thought, _I don't think stomachs were made to lurch like that._ "Was she pretty?" 

"And held herself with very good comportment." Pale, long-fingered hands busied themselves with pushing the drape of Kagami's yukata down. The cloth made a sigh against the chair they (Kagami) had dragged onto the balcony. "Just one thing."

Akashi always knew just what kind of carrot to dangle. "What's that?"

"A matter of equipment. Or rather, lack of." It was followed by a faint _hmm_ of laughter as their hands found each other. Akashi's fingers twined playfully before they slid home tightly. With both hands occupied, they were perhaps equal: Kagami, with his greater strength, could push Akashi off his lap easily; Akashi, with his knowledge of how human bodies work, could rip out his throat with his teeth.

_Hunter._ With white teeth that gleamed. In the sight of Akashi's teasing, Kagami flushed and fumbled for the words to say.

"Hey." The top bow of Akashi's lip was still curled up at the tips and it was utterly unfair how strong the urge was to trace it with his thumb to see the desire spread to Akashi's eyes. "I didn't mean anything by it. The books. I just...I feel like a bum, living off of you like this. I need to get a fucking job or something."

"You're my cook." The crinkles at the ends of Akashi's eyes might as well been a full-blown laugh.

"And we can all see how that's turning out." 

This time Akashi did laugh. Pillowed on Kagami's lap, hands full of Kagami's pecs, he only barked once with his back and the grin like a sliver of heaven. Close enough for Kagami to reach but at the same time something stopped him: these were the words that he didn't think he would ever say. The words he had never said to Kuroko.

_I'm sorry._

But whereas Kuroko would have replied distantly, Akashi was much more selfish. "Cook and love-slave," he murmured affectionately. Slick was produced from somewhere and before Kagami knew it his fingers were inside, a hard sex like steel thumping against Kagami as Akashi fucked himself down again and again. 

The mess was incredible afterwards. From somewhere in the strange churning in his stomach he dredged up a laugh too. The smell of ozone and burning things filtered from the mountaintops and after taking a few pictures of the red kanji on the hill, he joined Akashi in the bath.

He had said this much; he might as well say it all. "I'm not going to leave, you know."

"I'll burn every last textbook that takes you away from me."

"Dude, they were library books."

"I'll buy them a new set."

"You would, wouldn't you."

"Ever the philanthropist."

"Speaking for yourself, huh. How flattering."

"You know you're in love with my ego." And though it was said casually, the way Akashi paused spoke volumes. However truthful, this had not been within calculation. It was the first time it had appeared in their conversations. _By accident._

"I'm..." What to say. _What the hell was he supposed to say._ "Only if you do the same to me."

And there. That was the challenge.

Akashi faced the wall again. On the short stool his legs were apart, knees on the floor, posture deliberately relaxed. There was a bamboo container of water in front of him and Kagami imagined seeing their reflections bobbing together in it. Seeing him so easy, he felt like strangling Akashi for his calm, but the swooping sensation of his heart dropping to his stomach belied that. 

Then Akashi said calmly, "I'm well on my way already," and _No, stomachs weren't made to lurch upward like that either._

"No kidding?" Kagami blurted out.

"Yes."

"But why? How? You're supposed to be able to control this kind of thing!"

Akashi didn't have to look to knock the towel from his hands, same with the way he didn't have to look to clasp one of Kagami's hands to his heart. Everything seemed hypersensitive there: soapy fingers, liquid skin, a heartbeat that jumped like a fire being poked. Kagami leaned in a little and the blend of spiced shampoo ground at vestiges of his control. 

"You make control very hard to hold onto," Akashi whispered. He shifted around so their knees were touching. They stared at each other over the glistening tile. Those last few centimeters were a tantalizing, gaping abyss. 

But Kagami crossed it. Open-mouthed they kissed, tips of their tongues sliding against each other's teeth. Kagami steadied his hands on his thighs and just leaned in to sip and suck until Akashi gave up and let him rake his bottom lip with his teeth. The sensation was simple and familiar and all the intimacy that Kagami had once imagined with Kuroko, just...shaped differently. More red involved.

_What about me?_ , he wanted to ask. _Where do I stand now? Do you even know?_ Because he wasn't aware of himself anymore, the lines in the sand were all being blown away and he was back to fumbling white in a new chessboard. _Go easy on me._

Akashi tilted his head back and let Kagami do what he wanted, and in his surrender Kagami thought that maybe both of them had stopped acting by this point. That meant every kiss he was bestowing now on nipples, elbows, ribs and cock were all unfeigned. That meant he was true when he was gentle with the balls he cupped in his hand, the red marks of possession on white hips, the nudge of their cheeks side-by-side when Akashi aligned himself on Kagami's cock.

He sucked a deep breath that Akashi swallowed in his mouth. "Taiga." He continued until his voice broke and he had once again reduced Kagami to zero. Then his arms came around and if this was all real, then Kagami finally knew that was why. Being a sociopath didn't mean Akashi was incapable of wanting what other human beings wanted. _The same as me._

He had never expected this. "I'm not going anywhere." _Words he would have said to someone else._ "Here, Akashi."

If only Kuroko had known. Now Akashi took the proffered kiss, and the next, and the next, and with every singing lilt of his head in Kagami's touch he felt the guilt peel away layer by layer. They had both come this far; and Kagami wouldn't be the first to stop giving.


End file.
